Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: Woman Hollering Creek Summary & Analysis

As soon as Don Serafín gives Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez permission to marry his daughter Cleófilas and take her from Mexico to the United States, he predicts the marriage will fail and that Cleófilas will soon return to him. As the two young lovers depart, he looks at his daughter and says, “I am your father, I will never abandon you,” but Cleófilas is too wrapped up in the exciting moment to pay attention to these important words. It’s only later, when she’s living in the United States as a neglected mother that she remembers Don Serafin’s parting sentence. As she and her son Juan Pedrito sit by a river called Woman Hollering Creek, she thinks about love, about “how when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.”

Cleófilas is used to a slow life in Mexico, a life comprised of long afternoons spent going to the cinema to watch that week’s film, walking to get a milk shake, or watching the most recent telenovela episode with friends. For her entire life, she has been waiting for passion, but only the kind of passion that is “in its purest crystalline essence.” She thinks often about the title of her favorite telenovela, “Tú o Nadie”—“You or No One.” She adores the star of this show, as well as the title itself; “Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think?” she muses to herself. “You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end.”

Living in Seguin, Texas, Cleófilas wants to know how Woman Hollering Creek—which runs behind her house—got its name. Unfortunately, though, nobody seems to know, and when she asks a Laundromat attendant, the woman only says, “What do you want to know for?” She says this in rough, rude Spanish—the same kind she uses to yell at Cleófilas for using too much soap in the machines or for letting Juan Pedrito run around without a diaper in public. Since this woman is clearly uninterested in establishing a friendship, Cleófilas turns her attention to the women who live on either of her house. On the left lives Soledad, who is a widow (though nobody knows how her husband died). On the right lives Dolores, an old woman who burns altars and pines over her dead sons and husband.

The first time Juan Pedro hits her, Cleófilas doesn’t even try to defend herself. Although she’s always vowed to herself that she’d hit back if a man ever laid his hands on her, she just stands there as her lip bleeds. Later, she strokes Juan Pedro’s “dark curls” as he weeps “tears of repentance and shame.”

Juan Pedro frequents the local ice house, where a group of men hang around drinking and joking. Sometimes Cleófilas comes along, sitting quietly and slowly sipping her beer as the men make disgusting jokes. She gets the sense that these men drink because “they want to tell each other what they want to tell themselves,” but this proves more difficult than they’d like to imagine. After these nights, Juan Pedro often hits Cleófilas, his “fists try[ing] to speak.” When Cleófilas wakes in the morning and watches her husband sleep, or after they’ve made love, or when they’re sitting quietly at the dinner table, she often thinks, “This is the man I have waited my whole life for.”

Despite Cleófilas’s sorrow, there are moments of happiness, like when she comes home from the hospital after giving birth to Juan Pedrito and takes delight in the comfort of her house. Still, she thinks about her father’s house, wondering if she can ever summon the courage to return—she considers what the neighbors would say if she came back “with one baby on her hip and one in the oven” (a statement revealing that she’s pregnant once again). Confused, they’d ask, “Where’s your husband?” Indeed, she dreads the gossip that would swirl through the town.

While Cleófilas does the dishes one afternoon, she hears one of Juan Pedro’s friends say that what she needs is to be taken sexually from behind. The men laugh in response, and she merely mutters “Grosero” under her breath. This same man, she knows, is rumored to have killed his wife at the ice house when one day when the woman attacked him with a mop. “I had to shoot,” Cleófilas has heard him say to the laughter of his friends, “she was armed.” Juan Pedro tells her that she overreacts to comments like these, but she can’t escape the feeling that these stories proliferate throughout the community, as newspapers constantly report similar instances of women found dead and “beaten blue” on the roadside.

When Juan Pedro’s out of the house, Cleófilas goes to the window and watches the telenovelas playing in Soledad’s house. She thinks about how she used to expect that her love life would be like the ones she sees played out onscreen, which are passionate and perfect—at the same time, though, she notes that even the telenovelas seem to have taken on new solemnity, and each episode gets sadder and sadder. Pondering this phenomenon by Woman Hollering Creek one night, she wonders what she would change her name to if she ran away from Juan Pedro.

Cleófilas insists to Juan Pedro that she has to go to the doctor’s to “make sure the new baby is all right.” As she begs him to take her, he makes her promise that she won’t mention anything about how he treats her, telling her to say that she fell down the stairs if the doctor asks about her appearance. She also suggests to Juan Pedro that they write to her father asking for a loan to cover the upcoming pregnancy-related expenses, but Juan Pedro rejects this idea. Still, he agrees to drive her to the doctor’s the following Tuesday. 

When Cleófilas goes to the doctor’s office, a nurse named Graciela steps out of the room and makes a call to her friend—another nurse—named Felice. “This poor lady’s got black-and-blue marks all over,” she whispers into the phone. Graciela asks Felice if she can help, asking her to drive Cleófilas and Juan Pedrito to the Greyhound station San Antonio so they can board a bus bound for Mexico. “If we don’t help her, who will?” she says. Felice agrees to meet Cleófilas the following Thursday in the parking lot of a Cash N Carry. “Thanks Felice,” says Graciela. “When her kid’s born she’ll have to name her after us, right?” In response, Felice says, “Yeah, you got it. A regular soap opera sometimes.”

When Felice arrives at the Cash N Carry on Thursday, Cleófilas is surprised that she’s driving a large pickup truck. On their way to the bus station, they drive over Woman Hollering Creek, and Felice lets out a loud yell that scares both Cleófilas and Juan Pedrito. “I scared you two, right?” she says, laughing. “Sorry. Should’ve warned you. Every time I cross that bridge I do that. Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering. Pues, I holler.” Going on with her laughter, she points out that nothing else in the area is named after a woman, unless it’s named after the Virgin Mary. “I guess you’re only famous if you’re a virgin,” she jokes. In any case, she explains that this is why she likes the name Woman Hollering Creek. “Makes you want to holler like Tarzan, right?”

Cleófilas is astonished and impressed by Felice’s behavior. She asks if the pickup truck belongs to Felice’s husband, and Felice says she doesn’t have a husband. She explains that she picked out the truck and bought it with her own money. “I used to have a Pontiac Sunbird,” she says. “But those cars are for viejas. Pussy cars. Now this here is a real car.” Cleófilas wonders what kind of woman could ever talk like this, but then realizes Felice isn’t like any woman she’s ever met. And as Felice starts laughing once more, her voice starts “gurgling out of her” throat, “a long ribbon of laughter, like water.”